Posts Tagged ‘Marketing’

Hey, you're new. We like you already! You obviously have great taste! If you like what you read here you'll probably want to subscribe to our RSS feed (or the audio RSS feed). Stick around and be sure to speak up and post a comment or two!

A few years ago the concept of running a website in conjunction with your “brick and mortar” store was seen as just another avenue to generate a handful more sales each year. Today, websites generate a significant portion of sales for many businesses, and there are plenty of web-only businesses that don’t make their money any other way.

Every day, millions of people go to the web for research, shopping, news, entertainment and more. Offline stores are heavily promoting their websites to their consumers in the isles and at the checkout stand as a means of building brand loyalty as well as shopping convenience. Marketing your website online can literally add thousands, hundreds of thousands and even millions of dollars into your business bank account.

As consumers go to the web daily for any number of reasons, planning the online marketing strategy of your website can help you tap into each of those avenues as a way to generate new traffic, more conversions, and a loyal customer base. Ignoring the potential of the web will only serve to give your competitors a substantial advantage in reaching your target market. Not investing appropriate time, money, or resources into the online marketing of your website is akin to handing your customers over directly to your competitors.

Click here to keep learning

Choosing a SEO to manage your website marketing has never been easy, but during these tough economic times it’s more important than ever to choose wisely. No one wants to be the guy at the end of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, who chose the wrong chalice. You’re site will be nothing but a shell of it’s old self with the Knights of SEO standing over you saying, “He chose… poorly.” Uh, yeah… “Information that would have been helpful yesterday!” (to mix my movie quotes.)

If you’re a small business shopping around for the right SEO to help you out, there are a lot of things you need to consider before jumping in and hiring a SEO subcontractor or firm. Even if you’re on a tighter-than-normal budget–and really, who isn’t right about now–you can’t shop for SEO simply on costs alone. That’s like buying an economy car when you really need a mini-van. You just need to find the mini-van that offers the best features at the right price.

Not all SEO providers are the same and not all sites require the same type of SEO service. All thing must be taken into proper consideration. Here are five things that are relevant to the overall pricing and success of your optimization campaign.

Click here to keep learning

Over the last few months I’ve become a convert to Google. I’ve always used Google as my primary search engine but only recently have I started using a few other Google products such as Gmail, calendar and documents. I’m a fan.

But when it comes to search, I’m fed up with Google’s dominance. We could use a little competition in search.

Of course, it’s really not Google’s fault that they run between 50-70% market share, depending on who you ask. It’s really the fault of all of us searchers. We use Google because we like the results. We don’t use Yahoo or MSN because for whatever reason we feel the results are inferior.

Click here to keep learning

When providing SEO advice on the topic of website design, we often warn against placing important content into images. This is because search engines can’t read images like a person can. To them, an image with text is just an image. They really have no idea what the image is or if, in fact, it says anything at all. So when optimizing sites, anytime we are dealing with keyword optimized content, we want to make sure it’s standard HTML text. This includes headers, benefit lits, and even normal body copy.

While the search engines can’t read actual images, they can read what we say about the image. This information can be gleaned a few different ways:

• Image file name (image1234.jpg vs. mustang-gt.jpg)
• Text immediately surrounding the image
• The overall content of the page the image is on
• Image ALT attribute in the image tag

When trying to optimize images for image search, all of these can provide important indicators the search engines use to produce the best set of image results. In terms of traditional optimization and website usability, the ALT attribute plays an important role.

Click here to keep learning

• 5 Most Addictive Social Media Sites
• Integrating Social Media into a Web Content Strategy
• A Small Blogger’s Guide to Social Media Marketing
• Social Media for Firefox
• 5 Reasons You Must Start Using Social Media Now!

• See Like An Outsider In 3 Not-So-Easy (But Worth It) Steps
• We’re Not In Search-Land Anymore, Toto
• Spank My Relevancy
• 10 Ways to Increase Your Site Crawl Rate
• Get Your SEO/M & Usability Groove On

• Web Copywriting Tips – Write Sales Letters Which Convert
• When Should I Put Advertising on My Blog?
• Predictive Copywriting – Fight Big Publishers and Win in 2009
• What SEO Copywriting Is and Isn’t

Every year Reno puts on a rodeo event. I know this, not because I live here, but because every year approximately one person asks me, “are you going to the rodeo?”

Now granted I’m not a rodeo fan, but how is it that I don’t ever know about this event, save for the lone person asking me if I’m going? Is anybody even advertising this thing?

Ok, so I may not be the average consumer. I don’t watch commercials (thank you, TiVO!); I listen to commercial-free satellite radio or my ipod exclusively (thank you, XM and apple); I get all my news from the internet (thank you, Al Gore), rarely hitting local news sites; and I don’t get out much (thank you, blu-ray.) So it got me thinking….

Click here to keep learning

Click here to keep learning

Click here to keep learning